What’s at the root of it all?

Two recent items on PJ Online have made me me wonder whether there is a common denominator at the root of problems in health care and in financial services. And even elsewhere.

As the world goes into financial melt-down, we find ourselves reporting that errors in the administration of parenteral drugs in intensive care units are common and that the appalling care meted out to patients of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust included doctors ignoring medication policies and patients being given the wrong medicines.

So what is the common denominator between these two problems that seem so remote from each other? There seems to me to have been a loss of focus on core principles.

It is a truism that money makes the world go round. The operative words here are “world” and “go round”. Banks are there to circulate funds so that businesses develop and thrive. They are not there to stuff it into the pockets of their own staff in the form of huge bonuses based on short-term gains. And certainly not on gains that are now being exposed as fictitious.

The parallel with healthcare is that its core principle is to care. But instead of this people have become so focused on targets and box-ticking that care has faded into the background

Social work, too, is suffering the same malady. Failures over recent years have led to the development of a culture that demands so much form filling to make sure that things are done properly that little social work actually gets done.

I fear that until we all look to ourselves and ask whether our attitudes and approaches are rightly founded on what we do for others rather than on what we want for ourselves little will change.